Channel Insight: Support Growth By Embracing Sales Partner Ecosystems

In the modern world, it’s easier than ever for vendors to embrace an indirect sales model and create an ecosystem of sales partners – and plenty of businesses are doing exactly that.

Previously, being an indirect-sale vendor was a difficult prospect. A vendor was often disconnected from its sales partners, and very disconnected from their actual end users. Vendors often had little control over sales patterns as well, or had to take it on faith that their partners were working diligently to move product.

Today, however, it’s entirely possible to create a partner ecosystem that leverages the benefits of indirect sales, while minimizing the problems involved. Online access and shared cloud systems allow the ecosystem to be tied together almost as closely as a monolithic top-down sales entity! This can create situations where growth and innovation are encouraged, at a minimum risk.

Partner Ecosystems Create Great Opportunities For Growth

Creating sales networks can be extremely costly and time consuming.. The risks are huge, and growth is necessarily slow.

With indirect sales networks, however, your operations can theoretically grow as quickly as you can recruit partners interested in selling your products. This growth goes beyond mere geographical expansion, as well. With a variety of sales partners, you can potentially target multiple markets as well – but without causing your brand identity to become muddled.

Improve Innovation And Responsiveness

Flexibility is everything in the modern business world. Trends shift quickly, and buyer behavior can often be unpredictable. This makes it difficult for large operations to keep up, yet they must be able to do so if they want to remain relevant.

Having an indirect sales ecosystem helps reduce these challenges. Having a wide network of sales partners gives you plenty of sources of data on customer behavior from around the country, or around the world. When fed into modern data analysis software, this quickly reveals actionable insights that can help you spot trends as they’re happening.

Also, a rich ecosystem of partners brings a wealth of new ideas and input. When partners are excited by your products, they’ll be happy to contribute their insights – bringing more options when making business decisions.

Streamline Your Operations By Focusing On Core Competencies

When you shift most, or all, of your sales efforts onto partner companies, that allows your own business to streamline itself. There’s less need to maintain sales teams, or customer support centers, or other costly departments that detract from your core business model.

In an indirect sale ecosystem, your business can focus more fully on developing your products, rather than wrangling customers. That’s what your partners do on your behalf!

Partner Relationship Management Software Streamlines Ecosystems

The key to leveraging these benefits is to implement a strong core software system that links your ecosystem together. A single cloud platform can be shared universally across all your partners, serving as a central hub for communications, information distribution, data collection and analysis, learning/onboarding modules, and more. This is what allows indirect sales ecosystems to compete with the monolithic entities, while still benefiting from the indirect sales setup.